Everything has a history. I'm a historian. This blog is about the threads of history that I perceive in the world around me. I welcome any comments that bring light to the subject at hand.

Friday, November 13, 2009

What use is history, anyway?!

I followed a rabbit hole in response to an EotAW discussion about the philosophy of history that led me to learning a bit about the philosopher Walter Benjamin. Terry Eagleton published an article that provides an overview of his book on Benjamin, from which I draw the following snippets that provide an intriguing answer to the question that all non-historians ask: "What use is history, anyway?!"

The italics are mine:

"What Benjamin meant was that how we act in the present can change the meaning of the past. The past may not literally exist (any more than the future does), but it lives on in its consequences, which are a vital part of it. Benjamin also thought this about works of art. In his view, the meaning of a work of art is something that evolves over time. Great poems and novels are like slow-burning fuses. As they enter into new, unpredictable situations, they begin to release new meanings that the author himself could not have foreseen, any more than Goethe could have foreseen commercial television. For Benjamin, it is as though there are meanings secreted in works of art that only come to light in what one might call its future. Every great drama, sculpture or symphony, like every individual person, has a future that helps to define what it is, but which is beyond its power to determine.

"In one sense, we know more about the French Revolution or the Stalinist reign of terror than those who were involved in them, because we know what they led to. With the privilege of hindsight, we can inscribe these events in a broader narrative, making more sense of them than Robespierre or Trotsky were ever able to do. The price of this superior knowledge is impotence. There is no way we can use this knowledge to undo past catastrophes. We are like men and women frantically waving at history from a long way off, powerless to intervene in its crises and convulsions."

"[Benjamin] was aware that the past holds vital resources for the renewal of the present. Those who wipe out the past are in danger of abolishing the future as well. Nobody was more intent on eradicating the past than the Nazis, who would, like the Stalinists, simply scrub from historical record whatever they found inconvenient. The past was as much clay in their hands as the future. True power is sovereignty over what has already happened, not just the capacity to determine what will happen next.

"In one of his shrewdest sayings, Benjamin remarked that what drives men and women to revolt against injustice is not dreams of liberated grandchildren, but memories of enslaved ancestors. It is by turning our gaze to the horrors of the past, in the hope that we will not thereby be turned to stone, that we are impelled to move forward."

"Among the things that make up history are the things that did not happen, or did not need to happen, which often exert as profound an influence on the course of events as those that did."